Leg Cramps

For many years off and on I've had the problem of 'leg cramps' in the middle of the night. If a cool breeze happened to touch my leg while I was sleeping I would then get a 'charlie horse' in the worst way. To get rid of this 'charlie horse' I would need to stand on my tip toe and bounce a bit. It worked a way better if it is was a nice cool tile floor rather than rug, but then trying to get to the tile floor was a killer.

I talked to my doctor about this and he said drink lots of water, etc. So I tried gallons of water throughout the day. The only thing this did was that I had to pee all night long, but I still got the odd 'charlie horse'. So the doc next said try calcium pills.

Didn't work!

Then I spoke to someone and they advised that they had heard of people having this problem and they took cod liver oil pills. Now I haven't taken cod liver oil since I was about 8 years old or younger. I remembered it was in liquid form and tasted like shit or what I supposed shit tasted like not having ever purposefully eaten it. So I really wasn't all that thrilled about taking the cod liver oil. But on one trip to Wal Mart I spoke to the gal in the Pharmacy and she advised me there are now pills for cod liver oil. Hesitantly I decided to try them.

After a couple weeks I had no further leg cramps, but the odd twitch every now and then. We were improving for sure. The only problem I did find was at times when you burped you got this fishy taste in your mouth from the cod liver oil. Still better than cramps for sure.

Then I was browsing around and came upon the following write up from Snopes Oldwives Tale - Leg Cramps. I took a read on it and sort of laughed it off. Then I re-read it again and thought what the hell, lets give it a whirl.

The write up said that it didn't really matter which soap you used but I had a bar of dove soap in the cupboard so that is what I used. I took the bar out of the box and placed it between the sheets. Of course I spoke to the good wife to inform her what the lump in the bed was going to be. After all I didn't want her to find this bar of soap in the bed and wonder how in hell did that get there or figure I'd gone off the deep end. Even so, she did look at me a little peculiarly. I also ended taking the bar of soap with us to the lake where I've always had more problems with the charlie horses. This is probably because it gets cooler there at night then here at home.

Needless to say it has been a month and half and believe it or not I've not had one leg cramp since. Now I'm not sure whether it was the cod liver oil or the bar of soap in my bed or a combination of the two. All I know is that I haven't had to try and scramble out of bed in the middle of the night and stand on my tippy toes to alleviate the pain in almost 45 days.

Of course this may not work for everyone, but so far it has worked for me. Hopefully it will continue to work as those charlie horses are just not fun at all . . .